Caliper Forms Amphora to Provide Chemical Genomics Information, Products And Services to Speed Drug Discovery Using LabChip(R) Technology
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sept. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Caliper Technologies Corp. (Nasdaq: CALP - news) announces the formation of a new company, Amphora Discovery Corp., to create and commercialize a comprehensive database of chemical genomics information. The Amphora database will be designed for use in preclinical drug discovery, to accelerate target validation, lead identification and medicinal chemistry, as well as to increase the success rate of drugs through clinical development. The database will include a comprehensive collection of information about important aspects of a library of small molecules and their interactions with therapeutic targets. This information will include data on potency, specificity, drug absorption, metabolism, toxicology and physical properties of individual molecules. Caliper believes that Amphora will create the first comprehensive chemical genomics knowledge set detailing the interactions of small molecules with a broad array of gene products.
Amphora plans to sell this database information directly to pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology firms and academic laboratories involved in preclinical and clinical research in life sciences. It also plans to sell analysis tools, reagents from the Amphora compound library, and licenses to proprietary compounds and targets. Amphora anticipates industrializing screening on a scale not approached by any existing enterprise. Amphora will use Caliper's LabChip® high throughput screening systems to create, build and expand its chemical genomics database.
Amphora's management team will be led by Chief Executive Officer Martin Haslanger, Ph.D., former president of Sphinx Laboratories, Eli Lilly and Company, one of the largest high throughput screening laboratories in the world. Dr. Haslanger has more than 25 years of experience in pharmaceutical drug discovery with companies including Squibb, Schering Plough and Eli Lilly. William Janzen, Vice President, Operations, will be responsible for establishing and managing screening operations. Mr. Janzen was formerly Director, Lead Generation Technologies and Operations, at Sphinx Laboratories, and past president of the Society for Biomolecular Screening. The Amphora project was initiated in 1997 by Michael R. Knapp, Ph.D., Caliper founder and Vice President of Corporate Development. He recruited C. Nicholas Hodge, Ph.D., as Director of Drug Discovery Technologies to pursue the concept of a chemical genomics database in 1998. Dr. Hodge will join Amphora as Vice President of Corporate Development. Also participating in founding of Amphora is James L. Knighton, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Caliper. Dr. Haslanger, Mr. Knighton and Dr. Knapp will serve on Amphora's board of directors.
Amphora will be headquartered in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and will maintain offices in Mountain View, California.
Venture investors have invested $25 million in Amphora, and have entered into agreements to invest up to an additional $10 million if requested by Amphora. Current investors include Arch Venture Partners, California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), CW Group, MPM Asset Management, Orbimed Advisors, Venrock Associates and Versant Ventures.
Chemical Genomics: The Amphora Opportunity
In recent years, technology has dramatically increased the rate of genomics, functional genomics and high throughput screening data generation. The genomics and functional genomics efforts have significantly increased the number of therapeutic targets. Paradoxically, these efforts have not yet improved the speed, or decreased the cost, of drug discovery. Amphora will create a comprehensive chemical genomics database that catalogs the interactions between chemical drug candidates and targets. Just as the industrialization of DNA sequencing combined with informatics tools delivered the knowledge of the genome, this effort will provide comprehensive knowledge about characteristics of potential drugs. By so doing, Amphora anticipates making the link between genomic data, chemical structures and information that can lead to developing useful medicines.
One of the barriers to industrializing chemical genomics efforts with conventional technology is the imprecision, inaccuracy and lack of comprehensiveness of screening information. Amphora will be building its chemical genomics database with Caliper's LabChip® systems, which are designed to provide the precision and high quality of data researchers need to accelerate the identification, optimization and development of clinical candidates.
There are four key components of the Amphora chemical genomics database. First is the chemical library, which will be an extensive collection of high quality compounds. The library will be optimized for diversity and drug-like properties, as well as for specific activity against classes of clinically interesting targets. Second, the selection of biological targets will be based on their relationship to target classes that have proven to be important in serious disease states, that are amenable to therapeutic intervention, and that can provide critical information about drug behavior in humans, e.g., selectivity, ADME or toxicology. Third, Amphora has an exclusive license to use Caliper's LabChip® products in its commercial data base business. Fourth, the Amphora database will be bundled with state-of-the-art cheminformatics and data mining tools.
Commercial Strategy
Amphora intends to provide customers with information and analysis tools designed to reduce dramatically the time and expense of preclinical development and to enable the selection of higher quality clinical candidates with a greater chance of clinical success than current drug discovery methods.
``Using the database, it is conceivable that customers could reduce the time it takes to discover lead compounds from 15 months to as little as three months,'' said Marty Haslanger. ``We believe Amphora can deliver these benefits because the information required for target validation and lead optimization, including potency and selectivity optimization, ADME/toxicology as well as predictive modeling will be in the database and available to customers at the beginning of their compound selection process, eliminating the need to wait months for results between each stage of experiments. In addition, samples of compounds for use in target validation studies will be available from Amphora or from third party library suppliers.'' Thus, Amphora's commercial products will include subscriptions to its chemical genomics database, chemical genomics reagents for target validation, and intellectual property licenses for high-value lead compounds. Amphora intends to commercialize the database initially through an early access program and subsequently through subscriptions.
The LabChip® Advantage
Amphora will build and maintain its database using Caliper's LabChip® high throughput screening systems and will directly purchase those systems from Caliper. The miniaturized, integrated and automated LabChip® platform is designed to provide the capacity, throughput, cost-savings and quality of data required for Amphora's scale of operations.
``We believe that most discovery scientists in pharmaceutical companies today would agree that the accuracy and reproducibility of primary screening data are sub-optimal because of the high noise level associated with conventional systems,'' said Dr. Haslanger. ``Among the major advantages of the Caliper LabChip® HTS system are high sensitivity and precise detection, enabling the collection of reliable results from all the compounds in a screen. In the Amphora database, all the data will be valuable, as data showing a compound's inactivity is just as important as its activity, and the Amphora database will contain credible values for active as well as inactive compounds. We believe that only with the LabChip® platform can we generate this vast quantity of immediately useful, reliable information.''
Importance to Caliper
Amphora is being formed as a separate, independent company from Caliper with its own management team and board of directors. Caliper's ownership of Amphora is currently approximately 25%.
``We formed Amphora as a separate entity to leverage valuable resources that resided in Caliper in a way best suited to fully exploiting their utility and commercial potential,'' said Dan Kisner, Caliper's President and Chief Executive Officer. ``Caliper's strategic focus is on developing and commercializing LabChip® applications and systems and on realizing our goal to be the preeminent microfluidic chip innovator and manufacturer. We believe that Amphora will provide important, differentiated products and services for drug discovery and that these business goals could only be realized by establishing a separate company with its own financing, management and strategic focus. We are happy to have Amphora as a strategic partner and customer for our LabChip® systems and we look forward to the successful implementation of their business.''
Caliper Technologies Corp., a leader in lab-on-a-chip technology, designs, manufactures, and commercializes LabChip® devices and systems that enable experiments that ordinarily require laboratories full of equipment and people to be conducted on a chip small enough to fit in the palm of a child's hand. The chip contains a network of microscopic channels through which fluids and chemicals are moved in order to perform the experiment. The LabChip® systems are designed to streamline and accelerate laboratory experimentation and have potential applicability in a broad range of industries including pharmaceuticals, agriculture, chemicals and diagnostics. Caliper has established multiple strategic and commercial alliances and has built a leading intellectual property estate in microfluidic technology. For more information, please visit Caliper's new web site at www.calipertech.com. |
